Why a typewriter is the ultimate hipster accessory

The fashion for celebrating old-fashioned ways of writing and reading is not
healthy, argues En Khong.

A 1969 Valentine typewriter

By En Khong

11:30AM BST 16 Jul 2012

Last year Godrej and Boyce, the last company still manufacturing typewriters, closed their Mumbai factory. The accompanying flood of articles bemoaning the typewriter’s death nearly all ran along the same lines – the computer “encourages self-indulgence, the very worst literary sin”, lamented Paul Bailey and in a piece for Salon Jessie Schiewe (who describes herself as “a modern day Luddite, who doesn’t support digital books”) hoped for a “typewriter renaissance”.

So why this renewed interest in the typewriter, and why is this worrying? (Full disclosure: I’m inseparable from my own gorgeous, turquoise Olivetti Lettera 32.) The most obvious element to the attraction is a haunting idolisation – the clack of the keyboard that signals virtuous writing. After all we’d all like to be Cormac McCarthy .

The crucial point that Schiewe notes but does not challenge is that the revived interest in the typewriter is linked to a “retromania” – a term coined by music critic Simon Reynolds. Schiewe talks about bloggers who revel in obsoletism and scan their typewritten posts before uploading them online. Typewriters, like lo-fi photography, have become another hipster accessory.

Most of have us have seen hipsters wearing skinny jeans and thick-framed glasses sipping coffee with hearts drawn in the foam. Hipsterdom is rooted in the derision of consumerism prevalent in the Nineties. Hipsters have perfected the art of lauding their own taste, and in doing so, reinforcing their social dominance.

This subculture reflects a profound cultural anxiety. Hipsterdom in the new millennium promoted a new, edenic culture, illustrated by the popularity of twee music, obsessed with childish innocence (listen to the experimental psychedelic band Animal Collective, or the childish squeaks of folk singer Joanna Newsom). It is in this context that hipsters, both rebel and consumer, display a taste for archaic technology. As Richard Beck observed in his recent critique of indie music in n+1 , “so long as they practised effective management of the hype cycle, they were given a free pass by their listeners to lionise childhood, imitate their predecessors, and respond to the Iraq war with dancing”.

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I recently stumbled into Type, a design shop on Bethnal Green Road crammed with old paperbacks and manual typewriters – Royals, Remingtons and Olivettis. This is cultural decadence. Literary experience – the way we write and read – develops within particular contexts, and never for its own sake. We need new forms, not just a collage of old influences. We need to pursue a literary culture worthy of our time.

While the digital revolution has brought with it so much expansive and collaborative potential, at times it has seemed like in the last month some have been determined to strike back. The Wall Street Journal’s “Your E-Book Is Reading You” warned that digital reading statistics are allowing publishers an unparalleled measure of taste, eroding the intimacy of private reading and furthering the encroachment of commerce on reading.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo also announced that his latest work, Interventions, would not be available for electronic sale, instead standing as a tribute to the printed experience. Perhaps he should think again.